What is Enterprise Content Management?

Posted on Oct 5, 2010 in Records Management News

That ques­tion is often asked when com­pa­nies – large and small – are faced with some new need to either sort through the moun­tains of stuff they’ve col­lected or are pre­sented with a require­ment to look through said stuff (both on-line and off-line) to deter­mine lia­bil­ity on a court case. (By the way, I’m using the term “stuff” here to mean any­thing business-related which has been col­lected and pos­si­bly processed yet needs to be kept for some future pur­pose.) These days, hav­ing an Enter­prise Con­tent Man­age­ment (ECM) plan in place is essen­tial. First, this arti­cle will review what ECM is and where it has grown from. Then the arti­cle will review the cur­rent trends in ECM. Finally, there will be a look at what is com­ing down the road.

The Need for Enter­prise Con­tent Management

Back in the late 1700’s, when Ben Franklin was run­ning his print­ing shop, there was lit­tle need for an ECM strat­egy. Ben would have sim­ply stored Accounts in a ledger and orders prob­a­bly went into a folder. His arti­cle ideas for the “Poor Richard’s Almanack” prob­a­bly sat in a sec­ond folder of some type. If he needed some­thing, it was rel­a­tively accessible.

How­ever, in 2009, Ben would prob­a­bly be run­ning a multi-national orga­ni­za­tion with sub­sidiaries in many states and coun­tries. He would have a web pres­ence, mul­ti­ple employ­ees, deal with var­i­ous cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, may be pub­licly traded and cer­tainly have a legal staff at least on retainer. Ben will have invoices com­ing in for paper, sup­plies, main­te­nance on his print­ing sys­tems, phones, Inter­net, host­ing, and any facil­i­ties he’s leas­ing. In addi­tion, he will be col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on employ­ees, poten­tial con­tracts, sam­ples from ven­dors, mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, law­suits, workman’s com­pen­sa­tion cases and even archi­tec­tural designs for that new expan­sion into the new office building.

In other words, Ben will have a vast amount of “stuff” to track.

He espe­cially will need to track this when the inevitable audit comes and he must pro­vide proof that the expenses he used to depre­ci­ate the $1,500,000 laser paper cut­ter from three years ago are valid. In addi­tion he will be required to search through the 55,000 emails scat­tered in var­i­ous fold­ers to deter­mine which one in the past seven years per­tained to the employee seek­ing res­o­lu­tion for a co-worker’s insults. He might even be asked when the voice mail came in telling him of the audit poten­tial and what instruc­tions he was to follow.

This need for track­ing the var­i­ous col­lec­tions of items in a cat­e­go­rized man­ner was a prob­lem look­ing for an elec­tronic solu­tion. Many com­pa­nies have tried to inter­pret this solu­tion. The term for these solu­tions has become Enter­prise Con­tent Management.

Con­tent Man­age­ment in a Nutshell

Busi­nesses and gov­ern­ment agen­cies have moved from need­ing to sim­ply elec­tron­i­cally store paper doc­u­ments for the pur­poses of space sav­ings to being required to man­age huge vol­umes of infor­ma­tion. The sources of this infor­ma­tion are now paper, elec­tronic (email, chat ses­sions, web pages, doc­u­ments) and other media such as film or pho­tographs or video/audio. The chal­lenges is how to man­age all this infor­ma­tion, keep it both avail­able to those who need it and ensure restric­tions on the infor­ma­tion from those who are not allowed to access. In addi­tion, it is vital that cer­tain records with either man­dated or inter­nal purge require­ments be expunged from the cor­po­rate mem­ory. This becomes espe­cially vital when an audit – either exter­nal or inter­nal – hap­pens or when faced with an e-discovery request.

So what do you do? Run and hide? Not a very healthy solu­tion to any prob­lem. Let’s face it, the issue of records man­age­ment is not going to go away. Records man­age­ment is going to take some time, effort and plan­ning. It is expected that the cost involved will be recouped by either avoid­ing lit­i­ga­tion expenses down the road or by allow­ing some piece of infor­ma­tion to be accessed when needed.

The thing to do is to focus some money and effort on a com­pre­hen­sive records man­age­ment solu­tion. Records come in via many paths. They should all be cat­e­go­rized and archived in order to ensure you retain – and dis­pose of – the infor­ma­tion as needed for your organization.

Here is an exam­ple of the infra­struc­ture that might be needed:

In this sce­nario, infor­ma­tion comes in from many sources. Voice mails, video, instant mes­sages, scanned doc­u­ments, faxes, pho­tos and even SMS mes­sages are all cap­tured into dif­fer­ent stor­age loca­tions. These all need to be placed in a uni­fied stor­age loca­tion so that future staff can access and con­sume the infor­ma­tion con­tained on the var­i­ous media. This is the job of the elec­tronic con­tent man­age­ment (ECM) solution.

The ECM solu­tion should be built with rules and per­mis­sions such that doc­u­ments are retained based on rules. Some doc­u­ments from your human resources may be retained for the life of an employee plus 30 years for exam­ple. Oth­ers may only be retained for five years then should be destroyed. Other doc­u­ments may need to be retained indef­i­nitely. (Some com­pa­nies will have records dat­ing back to the 19th cen­tury or longer, which still may be rel­e­vant, depend­ing on busi­ness needs. For exam­ple, some gov­ern­ment agen­cies will main­tain records as long as the cur­rent gov­ern­ment is in exis­tence. In the case of Ben Franklin – any patent he sub­mit­ted or busi­ness fil­ing should still be on record in that state or county office and would be a suit­able can­di­date for being stored in an ECM repository.)

Roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties for the dif­fer­ent groups access­ing and main­tain­ing the Records Man­age­ment Sys­tems should be thought-out, defined, doc­u­mented and assigned. The infor­ma­tion relat­ing to the plan­ning and assigned roles should also be entered into the Records Man­age­ment Sys­tems. These roles will include those who access the records, those who might be able to trans­fer the records out in one way or another, those who will cre­ate the records and even those who can destroy or purge records as needed. Some­times these roles will be guided by busi­ness rules. Other times, there may even be legal require­ments, such as in the case of human resources or med­ical records.

Once the roles are defined, require­ments are gath­ered and a solu­tion is found, the imple­men­ta­tion should begin. This nec­es­sar­ily should be done care­fully and slowly. There will be mis­takes made at first, and too much expo­sure could cause a lack of faith in the sys­tem. Start­ing small – maybe with a sub­set of a divi­sion – will give the team some abil­ity to define best prac­tices when cre­at­ing the ECM solu­tion.
Read more at: http://www.ecmplace.com/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=13234%20Yu

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

8 Major Trends That Will Change ECM in the Coming Years

Posted on Aug 5, 2010 in Records Management News

August 03, 2010

Enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment is already com­posed of a com­plex, broad set of ideas and tech­nolo­gies — over the next 5 years, a con­ver­gence of trends across mul­ti­ple soft­ware cat­e­gories will have a mas­sive impact on this space. This list is by no means exhaus­tive, as ven­dors will also need to deal with evolv­ing chal­lenges around secu­rity, reten­tion, work­flow, cap­ture, and other aspects of ECM, but the fol­low­ing eight trends will fun­da­men­tally change how we build and deploy con­tent man­age­ment solutions:

8 Major Trends That Will Change ECM in the Com­ing Years

1 — Cloud, Cloud, Cloud.

We’re at the begin­ning of a shift from on-premise solu­tions to cloud-based plat­forms, thanks to the cost effi­cien­cies and shorter deploy­ment times that come with deliv­er­ing con­tent man­age­ment over the web. But the cloud is much more than just a new form of deliv­ery; merely mov­ing today’s enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems to a hosted envi­ron­ment will only achieve incre­men­tal ben­e­fits. Ven­dors now have the oppor­tu­nity to rethink and rein­vent the con­tent man­age­ment mar­ket, lever­ag­ing the real-time power of the web and build­ing pow­er­ful, elas­tic plat­forms that can scale up and down to address the needs of For­tune 500 com­pa­nies and small busi­nesses alike. Today, most ven­dors sell cloud solu­tions as a sep­a­rate prod­uct line that’s miss­ing much of the core func­tion­al­ity of their client-server offer­ings, but tech­nolo­gies like HTML5 will enable ven­dors to build richer, more inter­ac­tive web appli­ca­tions that can bet­ter address busi­nesses’ mas­sive infor­ma­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion challenges.

2 — Mobile Content.

Today’s work­force is more mobile than ever before, and con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors need to give users access to con­tent across mobile devices to enable col­lab­o­ra­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity any­time, any­where. Work­ers should be able to view and share files on their iPhones, Black­ber­ries, or Android phones. They should be able to engage more inti­mately with con­tent on devices like the iPad — com­ment­ing on the lat­est ver­sion of a pre­sen­ta­tion or pass­ing around sales col­lat­eral at a meet­ing. And to truly empower pro­duc­tiv­ity on-the-go, con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors should also look to inte­grate with other mobile pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, so that users can access and engage with con­tent from within mobile appli­ca­tions like Quick­Of­fice or Doc­u­ments To Go.

3 — Redefin­ing “Content.”

Data­base and Platform-as-a-Service solu­tions are going to drive a whole new def­i­n­i­tion of what we think of as con­tent. Ven­dors will need to deter­mine how unstruc­tured and struc­tured con­tent can coex­ist in this new world. Busi­nesses will pro­duce a tremen­dous amount of infor­ma­tion that needs to be con­nected to other classes of data in mean­ing­ful ways — for exam­ple, invoices need to be man­aged along­side con­tracts and cus­tomers records in Sales­force. This mix­ture of data types is going to pro­duce an explo­sion of inter­est­ing apps and plat­forms to help man­age and manip­u­late this infor­ma­tion, and in the process our def­i­n­i­tion of “con­tent” will change dramatically.

4 — Open Platforms.

Con­tent is most valu­able when it is acces­si­ble across rel­e­vant plat­forms, whether on-premise or web-based. After all, if users are work­ing within Sales­force or Net­Suite, shouldn’t they be able to access rel­e­vant sales col­lat­eral with­out hav­ing to open a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion? Today, inte­gra­tions with tra­di­tional enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions are com­plex, lengthy, and require sig­nif­i­cant resources from IT depart­ments or third-party experts. As cloud-based con­tent man­age­ment becomes more preva­lent, we’ll see the indus­try move towards open­ness, where rich, open APIs enable easy inte­gra­tions with other sys­tems, and stan­dards like CMIS pro­mote data migra­tion and enable con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions to talk to each other.

5 — Search Everywhere.

In the past decade, Google has unequiv­o­cally proven how impor­tant search is to our lives. Most of all our activ­i­ties involve a search func­tion either at the start of a process or as a foun­da­tional ele­ment to pow­er­ing other fea­tures and func­tions . Search will be every­where, and we’ll see ser­vices emerge just to help you search your cloud infor­ma­tion and enter­prise con­tent. Microsoft cer­tainly thought so when it bought FAST. All of Google’s prod­ucts have tightly inte­grated search. At Box, we try to cre­ate as much con­tent work­flow through a search con­text as pos­si­ble; dis­cov­ery, nav­i­ga­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and mobil­ity are all enhanced sig­nif­i­cantly by pow­er­ful search capabilities.

6 — Col­lab­o­ra­tion & Globalization.

Today’s orga­ni­za­tions need to be able to do more than store and man­age mas­sive amounts of infor­ma­tion — they also need to empower end user col­lab­o­ra­tion around this con­tent. We’re now shar­ing with col­leagues, ven­dors, and clients through­out the world, and sim­ple and pow­er­ful tools that help busi­nesses share are cre­at­ing a much more con­nected and pro­duc­tive world. Com­pa­nies like Jive and Intralinks have demon­strated that there is a seri­ous demand for col­lab­o­ra­tion tech­nolo­gies in the enter­prise, and con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors that seam­lessly inte­grate work­flow and col­lab­o­ra­tion tools within their prod­ucts will enhance the value of that con­tent. Fur­ther­more, cloud-based con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions can lever­age the power of the web to deliver real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion fea­tures, such as con­cur­rent in-document edit­ing, or real-time dis­cus­sion threads around files.

7 — Social Intelligence.

Social is cer­tainly the sex­i­est trend in enter­prise soft­ware today. Prod­ucts across soft­ware cat­e­gories are tak­ing a cue from ser­vices like Face­book and Twit­ter and incor­poat­ing more social ele­ments, and con­tent man­age­ment shouldn’t be an excep­tion. Share­point 2010 is loaded with social fea­tures, Box con­nects users to rel­e­vant peo­ple, con­tent and con­ver­sa­tions, and ser­vices like Jive and Sales­force Chat­ter help busi­nesses share infor­ma­tion on top of a social archi­tec­ture. Con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors can lever­age social rec­om­men­da­tions and dis­cov­ery to sur­face impor­tant busi­ness con­tent much more quickly, show­case real-time activ­i­ties in news feeds to pro­vide a more holis­tic view of what’s hap­pen­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion, and aggre­gate insights into how con­tent is being used.

8 — Big Data.

With EMC’s recent acqui­si­tion of Green­plum, the con­cept of Big Data is start­ing to get a lot more atten­tion from the larger enter­prise soft­ware and hard­ware ven­dors. A data explo­sion is inevitable, and we’re going to have to start to make sense of all this infor­ma­tion that’s being cre­ated. We’re also going to need sys­tems to help man­age all of this infor­ma­tion, and our cur­rent soft­ware and hard­ware archi­tec­ture likely won’t cut it. Finally, culling intel­li­gence from struc­tured and unstruc­tured con­tent is going to pro­vide mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties across indus­tries like Finance, Retail, Health­care, Sci­ence, and more.

—

Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net, which he launched in 2005 with the goal of help­ing peo­ple to access, col­lab­o­rate, and share all their con­tent online. Based in Palo Alto, Box.net has since grown into a lead­ing Cloud Con­tent Man­age­ment solu­tion for almost 4 mil­lion users and com­pa­nies rang­ing from small busi­nesses to For­tune 100 com­pa­nies. At Box, Aaron focuses on prod­uct and plat­form strat­egy, incor­po­rat­ing the best of tra­di­tional con­tent man­age­ment with the most effec­tive ele­ments of social busi­ness software.

Read: http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=164876752&gid=2851997&type=news&item=164876752&articleURL=http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2010/08/8-major-trends-that-will-change-ecm-in-the-coming-years.html&urlhash=AjSw&goback=.gde_2851997_news_164876752